That Bill C-32, in Clause 50, be amended by deleting lines 21 to 38 on page 82, 1 to 47 on page 83, 1 to 41 on page 84, 1 to 46 on page 85, 1 to 44 on page 86, 1 to 44 on page 87, 1 to 46 on page 88, 1 to 46 on page 89, 1 to 42 on page 90 and 1 to 34 on page 91.

Mr. Speaker, there are times in this parliamentary life when one has to wonder what in the world the government is up to. This particular blank tape levy certainly is one of them.

It was pointed out by the consumers association in its presentation to the committee that the mark-up, which is going to be applied by the government as an additional cost to everyone

buying blank tapes, will be applied at the point of entry into Canada. As everyone knows, about 95 per cent of all of the blank audio tapes sold in Canada are imported.

Therefore, if a nominal 35 per cent charge is applied on to a60 cent tape, now it becomes a 95 cent tape. When it was a 60 cent tape it would have gone from the original importer to some kind of a jobber or distributor, possibly to a wholesaler but more likely directly from the jobber or wholesaler directly to a K-Mart, a Wal-Mart or Eaton's or wherever it would go and we would have a lot of 99 cent tapes or $1.29 tapes with the mark-up applied to the 60 cent landed cost of the tape.

We have been promised what will now happen is the addition of 35 cents, more or less. I do not buy that but let us take 35 cents. Instead of a starting point of 60 cents it will be 95 cents and we will never see 99 cent tapes again. We are going to see a sale price of $1.49 or $1.89 instead of a 99 cent tape.

I do not understand the thought process of the government because if the $12 million it says this tape tax will end up creating was going to be ending up in the hands of the people who they intend for it, I would like to ask who is going to pay the administrative cost to collect the money in the first place? Who is going to pay the administrative costs to be able to distribute the$12 million?

We are going to create a business of collecting and distributing a certain portion of the money that will be extracted from the consumer. The consumer will be paying substantially more because of the decision not only to apply, if it is indeed a 35 cent charge, but the place in which it is applied in the feeding change of the mark-ups. It is applied right at the very start.

If the 35 cents is applied to a 60 cent tape, 95 cent starting point, $1.49 sale price, then on top of that will be the provincial tax and GST applied to the mark-up that was applied to the 35 cent charge. It is absolutely crazy.

This money is not going to get to the people who the government says it is going to get to because of the cost of administration, collection and distribution, really makes me wonder why we are doing this. The minister seems to pride herself very frequently on talking about protecting Canadian culture.

What really goes on more often than not-we just need to take a look at Sports Illustrated for an example-is we end up punching Uncle Sam in the nose. Unfortunately the people on the other side of the 49th parallel have a tendency to get a little bit agitated when we do that.

The industry in the United States is going to say now: "Just a second. Is it not true that the majority of the things that are being recorded from, in other words the CDs and the tapes, is it not a fact that the majority of the music in that medium that is being purchased in a Canadian store is actually an American product?"

The answer to that question is, yes, the vast majority of it is. About 70, 80 to 90 per cent of the product that is being purchased in a store comes through U.S. distribution.

How much logic does someone need to realize that the industry on the other side of the 49th parallel is going to say "you say you are collecting $12 million, we want 80 per cent of the $12 million, we want to collect the money that is due us because the music that is being copied is our property in the first place".

To turn around and make this money available, which will be coming from the blank tapes, exclusively to Canadian based artists and organizations is absolutely going to draw the attention of the U.S. We have already had a warning shot across our bow on this one.

If we are going to be saddling the Canadian taxpayer with taxes on taxes on mark-ups that are created to create this $12 million pool which is going to be attacked by the U.S. government, what are we accomplishing? We are just creating another trade irritant. It does not make any sense.

Furthermore, there is the matter of principle, which we have talked about from a very pragmatic perspective. When the minister was before the heritage committee she said that the vast majority of the 44 million tapes purchased in Canada every year, and there is some question about that number, are being used for the illegal copying of prerecorded material.

What about the churches? What about the colleges? What about the reporters? What about the people putting on sale seminars? What about people who have a legitimate use for these blank tapes? They are guilty by association and they are guilty by virtue of having the audacity to buy a blank audio tape. Suddenly they are guilty of some kind of crime. They are not guilty.

Any law in Canada that as a matter of principle assumes the guilt of a person who is undertaking a normal commercial transaction or indeed doing anything fundamentally in principle is wrong.

In collecting this $12 million, I predict this here and now. I look forward unfortunately with some chagrin to knowing that five years from now we will look back on this speech and be able to say "He was right, we created a trade irritant. That trade irritant actually spilled over to something to do with lumber and to something to do with wheat. It spilled over to something to do with the wool suit trade we have out of Quebec. It was a trade irritant that became part of a conflict between Canada and the United States, all over $12 million that the artists, composers and producers will never ever see".

Why are we doing this? The only answer that I can come up with is that it is very typically Liberal and with due respect to the minister, very typical of the way she does things. If the government does not do it, it will not get done. If the government does not interfere, if the government does not mandate, if the government does not take control, it will not get done.

The mischief that is going to be caused by the blank tape levy I predict within five years will be very measurable. I hope I am wrong but unfortunately I know I am right.

Mr. Speaker, it is with pleasure that I rise to voice my strongest objections to this part of the bill.

I really would like to urge the minister, who is listening carefully, and all the other members who in the red book promised to have free votes, to exercise that free vote, to vote against this bill unless this part is amended right out of there.

I remember when I was a young man in high school, there was one time our biology teacher had to leave the classroom. I was busily working quietly. We had a rule in my generation that whether the teacher was there or not, there was a lot of silence in the classroom. It was strictly enforced.

Some of my classmates started talking. Bless his heart,Mr. Harold J. Newlove, my famous biology teacher, came into the classroom to find the place in general pandemonium. He declared a penalty. Everyone would stay after school.

I tell you the truth, Mr. Speaker, I was not involved in that. I went to Mr. Harold J. Newlove and I said to him: "Sir, I have to catch a bus because I am one of these rural students. I have to get home to help my family with farm chores. I have to get away from here. Otherwise I need to walk four miles to get home. Can I please be exempted on the assurance that I was not involved? I am not guilty". Mr. Newlove said: "If I make an exception for you, where will it end? You will stay". You do not know how injured I was because I was innocent.

This is the fundamental premise in this part of this bill which is false. It assumes that if I go into a store to buy a tape that is blank I am going to commit a crime with it. What backward thinking that is. Why would even the Liberals, as they believe in the common goodness of all people, now suddenly come to the conclusion that there would be even one person in the country who would break the copyright laws?

I recognize the harsh reality is that some people do this, but to pass a law that causes every other person to pay the penalty for the person who actually did break the law I think is a violation of our fundamental sense of justice. We should all be outraged, as I was when I was in high school. That is the first point. We ought not to be punishing people for crimes they did not commit.

Second, and this I think is just as important, I believe that it is wrong to, by supposing that someone is going to break the law, make them pay the penalty in advance.

I read a statistic not too long ago that in the city of Ottawa the average person drives about 20 kilometres an hour over the speed limit. Judging by the cabs I have ridden in it is about 100 per cent over. Instead of going through that costly exercise of having police persons with radar and all of these other things, why do we not put a boundary around the city and everyone who comes in we will charge them all $100, a payment in advance of their speeding fine which we know that they will commit?

If we did that we could say to them go ahead and speed. Would we say that? What is the purpose of that speeding law? Is it not to protect, in the case of vehicles, the lives and the property of all of us?

If we have a copyright law, the copyright law has the purpose of protecting the property of the creator of the property. I know of which I speak. I happen to be a mathematician, a low level one but I casually sometimes admit to it, and I have some experience with computing. For a while I used to write computer programs and I used to then sell them. I used to first give them away because people liked some of the things I did and I was a generous guy and I said go ahead and have a copy of that program. Then someone said why not sell them.

When desktop computers came along, we had these little diskettes and I could put my programs on to those diskettes. I realized very quickly that there were some people who were making illegal copies, even of my stuff. I found out about it surreptitiously. I accidentally found out about it.

I put a notice in all of my programs that said: "If you have made a copy of this program and you did not pay for it to Epp Software, here is the address where you can send your royalties". I received some money in the mail because there were some people who said they liked that program and wanted to know where they could get it. Everybody who had a copy of the program said "copy it and send Ken Epp 10 bucks and he's happy".

I got a bit of money, not very much, I will admit that, but I got a bit of income from that because I asked people to be honest. For the others, I cannot do that. I do believe in the ownership of property but I do not believe that I would want to charge a person a penalty for stealing my property before he does it in the anticipation that he will. This raises a very very fundamental question of justice.

Picture me walking into a store and buying a case of C-60s, the little cassette tapes. Included in the price is an amount which will come to about a dollar by the time we are all finished, as my colleague mentioned, because we will pay GST and HST and BST and mark-ups and all of this stuff on that original 30 cents to50 cents, which I predict will soon grow to $1 or $2. Once the

government gets its fingers on a source of income it loves to make it greater. I will have paid on my little case of C-60s maybe $10.

My teenage son will now say to me "dad can I take one of your tapes because I want to make a copy of this CD I have to give to my friend?" When my kids even suggested they would do that I gave them a blanket "no, that is not legal and we do not do that".

Is it now legal? Can my son now argue with me and say we have already paid for the copyright on that thing by paying this special levy on the tapes we bought? Is it now legitimate that this Liberal government would say it will put a tax on the tape to allow people to break a law? That is absurd.

That is why I emphatically ask the minister to reconsider, to use some commons sense and think this through. I urge the members of that huge majority governing party to think about what they are doing and to read their red book again. Remember the one that said more free votes? Here is one. Here is a point.

My point is that they have it in their power to force the minister, to cajole the minister, to persuade the minister or whatever method they use, to get this very offensive part out of this bill. One way of doing that is to simply vote in favour of our member's amendment. It is the motion that says let us rescind this part that pretaxes breaking the law or that causes me to pay the penalty for other people breaking the law. Let us rescind that. If all members vote in favour of that it will pass and we will have accomplished something. We in this House will have done the right thing on this issue. I strongly urge them to do that.

I will be watching because if they do not, then when I go back to my people during the next election campaign I will have a moral obligation to tell them that they have had, courtesy of this Liberal government, this very strange law passed. I think they would even be ashamed at that. I am sure they will all support it and I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this.

The hon. member's approach does not seem to correspond with the intent of the bill. We should remember that the use of blank tapes is a matter of piracy. In committee we heard many groups, including the Consumers Association of Canada, confirm that in fact everyone was copying cassettes. You take a cassette, and you can make endless copies.

I wonder whether anyone in this House could say that neither they nor their family members had ever used a cassette to tape music from a record. I have some figures for the hon. member.

First of all, this type of private copying compensation system has been adopted in 25 countries. It is not a tax but a levy. A certain amount is levied, and it is called a levy because it is more or less a salary for performers who are entitled to receive it because they are the ones who create and produce.

Last year alone, 44 million blank tapes were sold. According to the report of the task force on the future of the Canadian music industry in 1996, at least 39 million of these cassettes are used for copying purposes, resulting in a total loss of about $325 million to the recording industry and performers.

Think about it. I think it is a very good idea to collect a levy from the source, from the manufacturers, and redistribute it as a salary to performers who are losing money because people are copying their cassettes.